The rising cost of social media management: why we changed our approach

By Lauren Beeching, founder of Honest London

I wanted to explain a change we’ve made at Honest London, because saying we’re focusing more on crisis PR could give the impression that we’ve suddenly decided to do something different. Crisis PR and reputation management have always been our main focus. We offered social media management alongside that because we had the skills and experience, and it made sense to offer both.

We still do social media. We support our reputation clients with it, and we have clients who still want us to manage their social accounts. We’ve become more selective about the work we take on because the gap between what some businesses expect and what they’re willing to pay has become difficult to justify.

After speaking with other social media agency owners, I realised how familiar this situation was to them too. They described the same struggles: more content, more video, higher expectations and smaller budgets. People were spending more time delivering accounts while finding it harder to charge enough to cover that time. It was reassuring to know we weren’t alone, although fairly depressing that so many of us were having the same conversation.

Full transparency, we were losing money on social media work under our previous approach. We kept trying to accommodate the extra work because we cared about our clients, but eventually we had to accept that the fees no longer covered what we were being asked to deliver.

My first experience of social media marketing was in my Saturday job

My first job was working as a receptionist at an optometrist on Saturdays when I was a teenager. I suggested they should have a Facebook page, which seemed quite an unusual idea to them at the time. I made it, a couple of customers came through it, and they couldn’t believe it. To be honest, neither could I.

Later, in the early days of Instagram, I became what you could probably call an early influencer. I find that incredibly cringe to write about myself, but there we are. I was sent to Venice, Oslo and other places in Europe to promote local businesses through Instagram. It was lovely, and looking back, quite sweet. People liked your photographs, a business invited you somewhere, and you shared it.

I loved Instagram then. The popular page, people posting their coffee, following strangers because you liked their photography. It felt much less serious. Then brands and celebrities joined, everything became more commercial, and influencer culture took over. I realise I was accepting trips to promote businesses, so I can hardly pretend I had nothing to do with it.

Since then, I’ve worked in all sorts of social media roles. B2B, B2C, fun consumer brands, very serious businesses and some subjects that were genuinely difficult to make interesting. I enjoyed it. I liked figuring out what people responded to and seeing something we’d made actually work.

I love social media, but some of it does my head in

I still love the creative side of social media. I like finding an interesting account, seeing a small business do well or watching someone build something from an idea. I’m interested in why people share certain things, what makes them trust someone and how differently they behave on each platform.

But personally, I think I’m too old for TikTok. The constant short videos do my head in. Everyone seems to be trying to be a comedian or copying a thousand other videos that are exactly the same. I don’t really get the appeal of watching the same joke performed by another person in another kitchen.

That doesn’t mean I don’t understand the platform. I know how to use it, I keep up with it and I understand why it can be valuable for a client. I just wouldn’t choose to spend my evening on it. You can understand something professionally without particularly enjoying it yourself.

Instagram and I have our issues too. I miss when people seemed less concerned about how everything looked to everyone else. Sometimes it feels as though liking someone’s photograph is a huge concession, or following too many people might somehow lower your status. It’s a photo-sharing app. It really shouldn’t require this much thought.

If I didn’t need to promote myself and my business, I’d probably spend much less time on there. Although I do love editing photographs on Tezza, which is doing quite a lot to keep me interested.

Knowing how social media works doesn’t make organic growth easy

One of the reasons we’ve changed our approach is that organic social media has become harder to deliver consistently within the kind of package many businesses still expect to buy.

Meta has changed how Facebook and Instagram distribute content considerably over the years. Having followers doesn’t mean those followers will see everything you post. People are shown a mixture of content from accounts they follow and recommendations from accounts they don’t, with different ranking systems across areas such as Feed, Stories and Reels.

That can be brilliant for discovery. A business can reach people who have never heard of it. But it also means that building a following and regularly reaching that following are two different things. You can’t assume that because an account has a certain number of followers, every post has access to that audience.

There also isn’t one trick that makes it all work. The content, the audience, the format and what you’re trying to achieve all matter. Posting more often won’t automatically fix something people aren’t interested in. A video getting lots of views doesn’t necessarily mean it brought in customers. And something that works well for one business may be completely wrong for another.

I keep up with these changes because I need to understand them. It’s also why I’m careful about what we promise. Organic social media can still work very well, but the idea that you can hand over a few photographs, approve a monthly calendar and expect steady growth is often unrealistic.

The content has to come from somewhere

Some businesses are naturally well placed to produce social content. They have an interesting product, a founder who enjoys being on camera or people in the business who regularly capture useful footage. Others need the agency to create almost everything. Those are very different jobs, even if both are described as “social media management”.

If a client sends over good footage, we can work with it. If we need to develop the idea, arrange filming, work out who will appear, get them comfortable on camera and then edit the whole thing, that requires considerably more time. And that’s before anyone has approved it.

We were seeing expectations of four or five fully created, fully edited videos a week as a minimum, alongside everything else involved in managing the accounts. Good content doesn’t necessarily need a big studio, but producing that volume consistently requires people, equipment, editing time and access to something worth filming.

For us to expand that service properly would have meant a substantial investment in production. That would also have needed clients willing to pay for it. Increasingly, those two things weren’t lining up.

Then came the changes

One of the biggest problems was the amount of work that happened after we sent a video to a client. People sometimes imagine you put it together, schedule it and move on. In reality, you could finish the edit, send it over, wait hours for a response and receive around eight changes that meant another two or three hours of work for an employee.

Then you sent it back again. Someone else might now have watched it and have a different opinion. The music needed changing. They wanted a section removed. Then they wanted it back. Something agreed at the beginning no longer felt right.

Anyone who works with clients will know the feeling of opening an email that says “just a few little changes” and realising your afternoon has gone.

Of course clients should be happy with what goes out under their name. We wanted that too. But there is a cost to changing your mind, even if the request takes ten seconds to write. Someone still has to reopen the project, make the changes, check the captions, export it and send it back.

Waiting for approvals also made everything harder to organise. The next video still needed making. Other clients still needed their work. A late response didn’t move the publishing deadline or give the team extra hours in the day.

We kept accommodating it because we wanted to provide a good service. Eventually, we had to look at how much time we were actually spending, rather than how much time the original fee assumed we would spend.

We wanted our pricing to be fair

We charged £2,500 a month to manage a client’s social platforms, with a little more for paid campaigns or influencer work. That was well below the roughly £4,000 a month I was seeing charged for comparable services. Our fee was the same whether the client was a large brand or a small business. I didn’t like the idea of looking at a company’s name and charging more simply because we thought they could afford it.

At the time, an employee could comfortably manage three clients. Plenty of agencies were allocating five or six accounts per person, but I wanted our team to have enough time to focus and do a good job. It worked. Most of our clients stayed for years, averaging around three or four years with us, which I was really pleased with.

The formula made sense. Employees were paid, clients received a good service and the business made a modest profit. Could we have charged more? Probably. But I liked knowing it was a fair price for clients and enough for the business. Being more affordable than comparable agencies also helped us attract work, and having clients stay gave us some stability. Honestly, I wanted an easy life. I wanted to do good work, keep clients happy and know the wages were covered without constantly worrying about where the next account would come from.

Then the work changed. The demand for video grew, production took longer, revisions increased and the same fee was expected to cover considerably more. With the volume and quality some clients now wanted, one employee wasn’t enough for even one account. Not close. They needed filming, editing, writing, publishing and customer service, often happening at the same time.

That completely changed the calculation. A fee that had worked when one employee could comfortably look after three clients couldn’t support an account requiring more than one person’s time. We kept trying to accommodate the extra work, but by the time we reviewed it properly, we were delivering those accounts at a loss. That was our responsibility to address, and we should have done it sooner.

What made it more frustrating was receiving new enquiries from businesses that wouldn’t pay even the £2,500, while asking for four times the output. I’m not exaggerating. We were already charging a fee that no longer covered the work, and prospective clients wanted us to lower it while doing substantially more. There was no sensible way to make that add up.

Expecting a whole team for less than one employee’s salary

One very large national company approached us with a proposed budget below £1,500 a month. They wanted two to three videos a day, alongside LinkedIn content, posts for X and customer service management. That was the budget for the service, rather than just the editing or one part of the account.

I genuinely didn’t know how they expected anyone to do it properly. They weren’t willing to pay anything close to the monthly cost of employing one person, but the volume and quality they wanted involved work you could realistically spread across about six people.

Think about what they were asking for. You need someone developing the strategy and ideas, someone writing scripts and captions, a videographer capturing the footage, an editor turning it into finished content, someone managing the accounts and someone handling customer enquiries. Photography and design may be needed too. Then there’s organising shoots, finding people willing to appear on camera, checking performance, attending meetings and managing approvals.

Some people can cover several of those jobs. Plenty of very good social media managers do. But being capable of filming, editing, writing and managing an account doesn’t mean you can do all four simultaneously. The hours still have to come from somewhere, especially when the expectation is several high-quality videos every day.

You also need the equipment and software: cameras or suitable phones, microphones, lighting, editing software, design tools, storage and scheduling systems. Depending on the brief, there may be travel, locations, props or studio costs. Even content that looks casual can require a surprising amount of preparation. “We want it to feel natural” doesn’t mean nobody has to organise it.

And that workload is before allowing for the rounds of feedback and changes I’ve described. If a video needs another two or three hours of editing, the next two or three videos still need to be made. A realistic budget has to account for the whole process.

This was the imbalance we kept encountering. Some prospective clients wanted the output and availability of a small production team for less than the cost of one employee. I don’t expect every client to know exactly how long an edit takes, but there has to be a willingness to understand what the brief involves and pay accordingly.

An agency doesn’t make those costs disappear. There are still people doing the work, using equipment that costs money, during hours they need to be paid for. That enquiry helped me accept that we needed to stop trying to make every budget work. We had to be honest about what we could deliver properly and what simply wasn’t realistic.

AI has made this conversation more complicated

I understand why some businesses question paying for social media planning now. They can ask AI for a month’s ideas, captions and a schedule, and get something they’re happy with almost immediately. For some brands, that is enough for what they want to do.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Businesses should use tools that help them, and agencies need to recognise when parts of a service have become easier for clients to handle themselves.

But there’s a big difference between asking AI for a content plan and producing everything on it. “Film a customer testimonial” takes a second to suggest. Finding the customer, arranging it, filming it, editing it and getting it approved still takes time.

AI can help with parts of the process. It doesn’t stop a client changing their mind or make someone available for filming. We were seeing less willingness to pay for planning and writing, alongside much higher expectations for the production work. That combination was becoming difficult to sustain.

We still offer social media

We haven’t stopped offering social media. We support our reputation clients with it, and we still manage accounts where the work fits what we can sensibly provide. Most of those clients are public figures who want to keep their accounts active and their followers updated. They’re generally looking for regular posts and someone they trust to manage things, rather than the constant content production a brand might want to drive growth.

For these clients, the priority is maintaining a strong public presence and a relationship with the audience they already have. We know their voice, understand their reputation and make sure what they share reflects them properly. That takes judgement, especially when someone is already in the public eye. We also work with a couple of brands whose goals don’t require several new videos a day. We agree on an approach that suits their business and audience, with enough time to give the work the attention it deserves.

Crisis PR and reputation management have always been our main focus at Honest London. We offered social media alongside that because we had the experience, and it still makes sense for these clients. Understanding their wider reputation also helps us make better decisions about what goes on their accounts.

We’re a boutique agency, and I’m happy with that. We can do this work well without building a large production operation or taking on briefs that need more people and resources than the budget allows. We’ve become clearer about which social media work suits us, and those are the accounts we continue to look after.

What I’m grateful for is how much we know

For all my complaining about the apps, I’m very grateful for the amount of social media experience we have. We understand what goes into the content, how the accounts work, how people respond and how paid marketing fits into it. I keep learning because it changes constantly, and that knowledge is useful to our clients.

PR goes far beyond traditional media. Someone can form an opinion about a business from a newspaper article, but also from a TikTok, a LinkedIn post, a review or a screenshot sent by a friend. They might never see the original story or the full response.

That matters when we’re advising someone through a crisis. We need to think about what people have actually seen, what they believe has happened and where they’re looking for answers. A statement that makes sense to everyone inside the business may make very little sense to someone who has only watched a short clip.

Our social media experience helps us think through those details. Does the response answer the actual concern? Is it easy to find? Could one sentence be pulled out and misunderstood? Are promotional posts still going out while customers are asking serious questions? Does the person answering messages know what to say?

Those things can look small in a meeting, but they matter when you’re the person managing the account and dealing with the reaction.

Understanding the tools is only part of the job

We also understand paid marketing, which helps us assess when wider distribution might be useful. But paying to put a message in front of people doesn’t make them believe it. If the response is poor, promoting it can simply make more people notice that.

The same applies to engagement. A post attracting thousands of comments might look impressive in a report, but in a crisis those comments could tell a very different story. Sometimes a clear update that reaches the people affected is more useful than a response that attracts everyone’s attention.

The facts still come first. If something has gone wrong, people need to know what is being done about it. If a claim is inaccurate, correcting it requires evidence. Knowing social media helps us communicate that properly and manage what happens around it.

That is why I value the experience so much. It gives us a practical understanding of the places where our clients’ reputations are being discussed, alongside our established crisis PR expertise.

I still love plenty of things about social media. I just don’t think loving the work means ignoring what it costs to do it properly. We needed to change how we delivered that part of the business, and I’d rather explain it honestly than dress it up as something else.